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Is it a coincidence that turn-based RPG Telepath RPG: Servants of God was released on Feb 14th, 2012? 20 divided by 12 is 1.666666666666667. Basically 1.6. What’s the multiplication symbol? An ‘x’. How else is ‘x’ used? When we say things like ‘an x number of boats’. So if we were to say an ‘x number of 16 (derived by multiplying 1.6 by ten) we get ‘a 20 of 16′. If you remove the ‘a’ and ‘of’, you get 2016. Ghostbuster’s II predicted that the world would end on Valentine’s day, 2016. What could this mean? It means the Middle-Eastern flavoured tactical treat Telepath is out now, obviously.

Pondering playing a text heavy, lore thick strategy game? The demo is here, although it needs Adobe Air to install, but it’s a generous lump of game.

You know what else is generous? The freely available earlier games in the series.

Have only played around 2 hours of it so far but it’s a really ambitious title which should appeal to fans of story-heavy RPGs and turn-based gameplay. The tactical combat scenarios are accessible and on a manageable scale without at the same time becoming too easy, there are quite a few upgradable stats and powers to mess around with and also some fairly sensible penalties for playing sloppily. Despite a potentially heavy-handed theme, the dialogue is enjoyable – with the exception of a Suzanne Vega reference delivered with all the subtlety of a nuclear holocaust – and the infrequent but professional voice acting is certainly a whole lot better than what you’d expect from a small indie production.

And that’s the problem. The software itself isn’t harmful, probably, but please ask before installing something next time. If I don’t know what software does or why it got installed, I remove it.
Main problem I’ve had with Adobe is the updater that installs and runs on start up.

I think Air gets a bad name because the LoL screen in between games is Adobe Air, and it’s just messy. All of my friends who play LoL have had moments where air freezes or doesn’t exit or what have while the game is still sort of running in the background.

You’ll want to let that updater do it’s thing, if you’re going to pick up some driveby malware it’ll be through a hole in flash or acrobat.
That said I kill the updater in the registry, and download the latest version of the installer every time they release, but that’s part of my job.

Adobe Air is a .. lightweight programming environment. The main idea is you can build things quickly.

The problems with it are:

– it’s pretty inefficient, which is a combination of a sort of overpromise of vector based development, and bad programming on adobe’s part
– a fake promise of portability. It works iffy on windows, poorly on mac, and is a total turd on linux (and cancelled on linux, to boot)
– as a result of the fake portabilty, your code is essentially locked to adobe forever, there’s no easy port out of it
– it has security problems, like other related adobe flash things
– it may tend to run down your batteries or spin up your fans

For many gamers, none of these are a dealbreaker. I’ve bought multiple Air games myself. But overall, developers, please choose a framework you have a bit more control over? SDL isn’t really much harder, for example.

I haven’t checked out any of the developer’s browser games, but Servants of God seems pretty self-contained both in terms of story and gameplay mechanics so there should be no need to play the older stuff.

You don’t need to have played any of the earlier titles, though you’ll have more of an appreciation for the world and some of its history if you’ve played Chapter 2. I’d suggest avoiding Chapter 1 entirely.

Straight from the man himself, thanks for the reply! I’ll try to fight down my allergy to browser games (not the games themselves, really, but the “temporary” feel of playing in a browser window) and give 2 a proper look.

I’m all for turn based rpgs, but this looks hideous. Some of the art looks as though it was drawn by a 8 year old. Also what’s the deal with flash ? This looks and plays like any browser game, except it’s not. What’s the point of using flash in this case ?
Oh and most importantly: 25$ for this ? Is it for real ? This is a 5$ game at best.

I think that this game looks awesome, but I agree $25 is a bit pricey. It’s a catch-22 that lots of indie games have (especially the niche matrix strategy games). Because he’s not on steam he needs a higher price to make up for the lower amount of sales that come with not being on a major distribution platform, but because it’s a bit high less people can afford to buy it.

Anyway, I love the idea and if it goes on sale for $15 I’m down. Also I just got the demo, and if I totally fall in love with it I’ll be buying it regardless of price.

I think the main problem with the visuals is just that it’s impossible to make directly-overhead graphics really appealing. The best you’ll get is kind of functional looking. There’s a reason even old NES RPGs skewed their perspectives more.

That said, I’m pretty sure the developer’s aware of this and is planning to fix this problem for the next game, I think I remember him on here saying that.

@JoeyJungle The whole “this game must have a certain price tag because it is not on Steam” argument seems a bit arbitrary to me. It’s entirely reasonable that a sizeable indie RPG which includes many hours of combat, dialogue and customization costs more than, say, 10 bucks precisely because it is a sizeable indie RPG with lots of content. Whether it’s on a particular digital distribution platform is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned – it’s not like the developer’s website sinisterdesign.net is any more difficult to access than steampowered.com.